[jboss-user] [JBoss Portal] - Re: Is JBoss Portal ready for prime enterprise use?

[roy.russo@jboss.com]

These questions are commonly answered by our sales engineers, but Ill take a crack at the ones I can answer:

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - Can a development be started  with JBoss Portal 2.6 in its current state? What are the risks? Our first production deploy would be in February. In case this isn?t possible, what is the risk of starting with 2.4 and changing to 2.6 whenever it turns to be possible?
  | 

2.6 will change as its a dev branch. You are safe to start with 2.4.x, and then migrate to 2.6GA. As of 2.4, we offer a migration application for conversion of data, to smooth the migration process. http://docs.jboss.com/jbportal/v2.4/reference-guide/en/html/changelog.html#migrating_database

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - We are planning to use EJBs 3.0 in the back-end running on JBoss AS. Can the front-end (JBoss Portal) run over the same version of JBoss AS?
  | 

Yes. The JEMS installer is capable of configuring all of this for you, so you dont fall in to library-hell.

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - Can we configure JBoss Portal to run in a Farm? We don?t want any kind of overhead associated with session replication or cache sharing. We would have a load balancer with sticky sessions.
  | 

Yes. We also offer a pre-configured clustered version in 2.4. We don't offer this for 2.6 yet, as its a dev branch, and we dont want to slow down releases in QA for HA.

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - Does JBoss offer support for JBoss Portal? Is version 2.6 supported? When would it be?
  | 

Yes. 24x7 support, and we also offer development support (pre-production). I'm not sure if we scope support by version. Since portal sits at the top of our stack, we also offer inclusive support packages for the underlying components... cache, clustering, hibernate, AS, etc... We employ the leads and most of the committers on those projects, so you dont have to worry about having some inexperienced oaf answer you for, lets say, hibernate support. ;-)

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - We are required to have a Staging environment, any plan to support this? Which would be the recommended starting path? 
  | We have though about 2 possibilities:
  | 	a. Having 2 database schemas in parallel, one for Staging and the other for production (read-only). At the time of publishing, and ETL would transfer the data from the staging context to production and then refresh the state in some way.
  | 	b. Implement persistence of pages, portlet layouts, and portlet preferences to the JCR therefore having the versioning and staging facilities proper of JSR 170.
  | 

There will be *some kind* of support for this in 2.6. There will be extended support of this feature using JBossON. 2.6 support will most likely consist of a snapshot dump for the admin, that he can then move to production. 

Most of our customers now, are using method "a", but DB synching can be tricky. ;-) So we will offer something to facilitate this.

There is a relevant thread here: http://jboss.org/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&t=90764 Thoma Heute is in charge of this component.

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - JBoss Portal CMS support seems to be very basic. We require structured content edition and a page browser when inserting links in the WYSIWYG HTML editor. We have liked the WCM from Alfresco, is there any plan to integrate it with JBoss, when? If we choose to follow this path on our own, could you point us in the right direction?
  | 

Alfresco's admin side can be currently deployed on jboss portal. What we are in need of, is a "viewer portlet", like the one we bundle. Work for this viewer portlet will likely being after 2.6, unless the community contributes it earlier. ;-)

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - Our extranet users (visitors) wouldn?t manage neither portlets nor layouts. Would it be a good decision to have all of them mapped to only one user (?guest?) in JBoss Portal.
  | 

Yes... or just not let them have dashboards at all.

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - We need to have a very fine grained control of the cache http meta-data to send appropriate cache commands to the caching servers (Squid). How could we achieve this?
  | - Do you have plans to support ESI (Edge Side Includes)?
  | 

Sorry, can't answer these.

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - A very strong requirement for us is to have a per-portlet configurable application cache. The JSR 168 standard provides it in a per-user basis however we need it per-portlet and application wide, can JBoss Poral be configured this way or we should use an additional cache layer like OSCache. Portlet caching in JBoss is performed per-user or per-session basis? If per-user is the case, having all extranet visitors as the ?guest? JBoss Portal user would solve the problem?
  | 

You can set the cache interval in the portlet.xml, so that value then applies to all instances of the portlet.

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - We are expecting around 40k hits per second. Is the JBoss Portal performance enough for such traffic? Do you have success cases in high traffic portals? We are planning to have 10 JBoss Portal servers in Farm for the front-end and 10 JBoss ASs in cluster for the back-end running Stateless Session Beans 3.0.
  | 

JBoss.org runs on a HP DL380, 2x3GHz CPU, 2G RAM. It sees roughly 3-5 million pages/mo.

I can't tell you customer data, though. :-(

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - The system has many sites (countries) with different look & feels, can JBoss Portal be configured to run the same portal (same set of pages) with different look & feels? 
  | 

Yes. Via xml descriptor or adminUI.

"walbar" wrote : 
  | If that is the case, can it manage a cache for each site (country)? If a small set of pages needs a different configuration (portlets in the page, layout, portlet configuration), how we should model this?
  | 

We do not have a portal-instance-level cache available. Cache is configured, per-portlet.

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - We are thinking of using Acegi security. In some cases security constraints would imply to remove portlets from pages. How can we achieve this?
  | 

My name is Roy, and im the resident security idiot. ;-)

"walbar" wrote : 
  | - Would you implement eBay with JBoss Portal?
  | 

Can I get some free PS2 games?

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